


secret gay high school lovers, part one of one

by ellisonjpine



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: M/M, ambiguous canon/non-canon setting, hello LGBT community!, im the co-leader, lol i wrote this for the schools creative writing club, this whole thing is just a monologue for jared being sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2020-10-18 17:56:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20643302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellisonjpine/pseuds/ellisonjpine
Summary: A little glimpse into Jared's head.





	secret gay high school lovers, part one of one

Jared Kleinman is not the most eloquent of people. In fact, one could argue that most 17-going-on-18-year-old teenage boys with severe anger issues and a history of emotional repression trailing back half a decade give-or-take, are not. And yet he values himself on his words, because if there’s one thing he’s got going for him it’s gotta be some spicy one-line zingers. ...Other than that. Does anybody still use the word zinger? Hell, does anybody even use spicy?

Not a great start for a self-declared wordsmith. But he’ll manage.

‘Cause he always has. Middle school was where it kinda started getting tough, but he’s sure 99% of his peers can share that sentiment. It’s gotta start getting bad sometime, right? And for Jared it was his first year of Summer Camp. Or, more well-known (in his head at least) as The First Summer Without Evan. When they were kids, they were inseparable. But then Evan’s parents got divorced, and his dad moved away, and there was the whole thing with Jared’s parents too that he didn’t want to get into when he was wallowing about Evan, and everything kind of… got a little harder. But back to Summer Camp. Jared never liked the summer, still doesn’t and never will, but as much as he begged and pleaded he still ended up getting dragged off for this month-long “adventure” which was, quite simply, a waking nightmare. Social exclusion was normal for him, as the fat nerdy kid, but it was always with Evan. Evan, who wasn’t fat (not comparatively), but who wore polo shirts and khakis and talked about trees so much it was like he had undergone experimental surgery but something had gone wrong and the doctors had to do an emergency transplant and he’d come out of it with his brain replaced by The Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of Native American Pines, or something. 

(Jared was always a bit dramatic).

Summer Camp, though. This time he didn’t have Evan to hide behind. He was like, twelve or something, so he was inherently way less cool than he is now, but Jared was a notoriously uncool preteen. Look - It wasn’t his fault his geeky glasses got broken and he couldn’t help his team in Capture The Flag (and he’d never been good at sports to begin with), and it wasn’t his fault that he’d always had that slither of self-doubt that probably first emerged when he was too young to remember the trauma - but Jared learned the hard way that apparently twelvies found it socially unacceptable to speak up about your concerns that your friend group was (and, as he learned, yes, they were) excluding him on purpose. Could you imagine the audacity? Because poor little Jared, sitting there at a crowded table and feeling very alone in his worn-down Converse, sure couldn’t.

But he’ll manage.

...Or will he? Because it feels like the end, right now - of the world, of his life, of his heart, he doesn’t know - all three, probably - and he’s spending his last moments lying on his bed with his head dangling off the side so his glasses slip up the bridge of his nose and all the blood rushes into his brain. He’s trying not to look around, preferring the ceiling for his viewing pleasure, because the rest of his room… Everything in his room reminds him of Evan.

Here’s the thing. They’re not your classic “buddy-buddy childhood best friends”, or anything - in fact, far from it. But Jared considers Evan a friend, at least, if not something a little more than that. And it’s a pity that Evan “Heterosexual” Hansen just can’t seem to see the appeal of Jared’s curly brown hair or slightly too-tired eyes or chubby muffin-top, or whatever, but Jared can deal. Jared can always deal. He’s pretty good at finding things to hide behind - hair gel, tortoiseshell glasses, a collection of semi-ironic graphic tees. A sneer. A subtle turn of the shoulder. An enthusiastic insinuation that we’re just family friends, Evan, nothing more than that.

And though the sandpaper of sarcasm might have let his heart settle, it sure didn’t help Evan. He can pretend to ignore it, can even get up to a 14-month streak of barely talking to the guy - but deep down he knows his actions hurt Evan. No - He knows his words hurt Evan. He’s not dumb, for as much as he liked to act like a fool. Evan had always been sensitive (social anxiety was a bastard and a freak and Jared should have known that as the guy who held Evan’s hand at the doctor’s during the diagnosis when they were nine), but Jared’s prickly behaviour just aggravated that. He took a sore spot and grated at it until Evan… hid himself away. From not just him, but from everybody. 

Oh, and he could quip about Zoe Murphy all day long. But it would be pretty obvious to anybody, even those not engaged in a weird estranged-childhood-friend-love-hate-relationship that Jared was just jealous of her. Her with her pretty, long, shimmering, wavy blonde hair, and her slender frame that was “petite” rather than “stout”, and those blue, blue eyes. Screw the blue eyes, man. Evan loved the colour blue. Frick, over half his wardrobe was blue. The only blue Jared had was in his heart. He could make jerk-off motions in Evan’s vicinity all he liked, but the guy wasn’t gonna magically fall in love with or draw cheesy notebook-margin doodles of or write English descriptive prose assignments about him.

God, why did Evan have to - why did he make Jared act like this? What, because Jared thought - he thought pursuing this whole lie would help them grow closer as lovers? Yeah, sure. Just what a normal, sane highschooler would think of during his midteen crisis. He might call Evan “uncool”, but what did that make Jared? Pro gamer tip: push your best friend away into isolation in order to save your heart from another little old rejection! Don’t forget that you don’t have any other friends besides him, either!

Look at him. He’s useless. His freaking head hurts now, and his heart doesn’t any less.

Get up, he tells himself, but his body won’t listen. He compromises with rolling over. I’m a dog, he thinks, and breathes a laugh out of his nose. That’s a Weezer line, I’m sure.

Now that he’s on his stomach, he can see the mess on his floor. There’s t-shirts and hoodies everywhere, some of which he’s unsure of the cleanliness of. There’s miscellaneous socks thrown vaguely in a pile. It’s all like some kind of weird art thing. Evan could probably find the meaning out of it, but Jared prefers to look away.

A half-empty bottle of Mountain Dew sits on his desk while his laptop is charging nearby. Quite a precarious setup, but these past few days (weeks, months, years) he hasn’t even felt fine enough to sit up, let alone scroll ‘the Facebooks’. Which should be a good thing. But it isn’t. And it should scare him. But it doesn’t.

He wishes Evan was the type to revel in the suffering of others so that Jared could have something, something bitter and spiteful and kick-your-doorframe angry, but the whole reason why he fell in- why he feels this way about Evan is because he fundamentally isn’t that kind of person. He always had some way to be nicer, to be kinder, to be less intrusive. Gorgeous, as Taylor Swift would say, not that Jared was going to reveal his very special and very private Spotify playlists from when he was a freshman. He wishes he could go back to how it was. He wishes it was never like this at all. He can’t live without thinking of Evan. He can’t live without hurting Evan.

You’re welcome, asshole, he thinks, and feels his chest tighten.

When he cries, it’s ugly. This is a fact of life. Just like how grass grows, birds fly, sun shines - Jared is an ugly crier. He’s the whole package. Sobbing, sniffling, wobbly lip, puffy eyes, you name it. His tears are sliding onto the grimy carpet. He tosses his glasses onto his desk (where they narrowly miss the Mountain Dew), and scrubs at his eyes with the blankets - but it’s too late. Like word vomit, it’s just unstoppable. Isn’t that what he is? Unstoppable, unhinged, uncontrollable. Impulsive. Imperfect. In love.

**Author's Note:**

> did u catch all the Funny References that are only applicable to me and my interests? we got errrr el scorcho/butterfly lyric from pinkerton, tf2 scout quote, bmc mountain dew.... i think thats it hehe
> 
> also i have no idea how summer camps work :P
> 
> anyways hope u liked this it was fun to write :-)!


End file.
